Know your audience
Now that real speaking is returning, I’ve been given the amazing opportunity to work with Georgia Murch. Georgia leads Can We Talk who are experts in designing feedback cultures and how teams 'work as one'. Whether facilitating a discussion, leading a training session or sharing a keynote from the conference stage, she knows the better her speaking, the greater the value for the audience and her business.
If you've read Real Speaking Returns (the free guide to being more entertaining, more likeable, and more profitable when public speaking), you'll have seen the five key things you should think about before you actually start writing or preparing your presentation, the second of which is People.
In this step you're invited to think about who is in the audience, and what they care about. It's critical to consider this carefully. I'm sure you've been in the audience for a presentation where it was clear the person on stage was passionate, enthusiastic, and well researched... and talking about something utterly irrelevant to your life. It’s a painful experience for and for them, and the cause is so simple: they hadn't thought about the People.
As Georgia and I discussed the opinions, perspectives, problems, and incentives of the people she tends to find in her audiences, I invited her to think about them across a few psychographic categories: cynics, skeptics, and optimists. Those categories provided a useful point of discussion, when Georgia had a brainwave and exclaimed, "There's another category! The realists. These people are actually easier to work with than the optimists because they understand the challenges they're likely to face along the way".
The moment she said it I knew she'd provided the perfect final piece of the puzzle. As we worked through each of the four categories, we were able to identify the different problems they face, the different goals they strive for, and the different blind spots they carry. It was an incredibly productive session.
So, as you explore the perspective of the various members of your audience, you may find it useful to ask yourself, "What are the cynics thinking? What are the skeptics thinking? What are the optimists thinking? What are the realists thinking?", and take notes about each. (It can also be useful to think about what sort of percentages of each show up in your typical audience).
If you haven’t thought about how to grow your commercial impact through public speaking, I invite you to give it some serious consideration.
Cover photo by Miguel Henriques on Unsplash